Join me, if you will, in a full-tilt wallow into the depths of cynicism. First the official story from IMDB, hat tip to smartest man alive Skot:
Seinfeld star Michael Richards …has been banned from The Laugh Factory for repeatedly calling two African-American hecklers “n**gers” during a foul-mouthed rant onstage there earlier this month. The comedy [...]

Over the holiday weekend, my wife and I had a scheme to meet another couple in Malibu, have a little dinner and go to the local theatre to see CASINO ROYALE. Best laid plans, baby. We drove over the Malibu Canyon pass and arrived around 4:10pm, only to be told that the 7:00pm show had [...]

Box Office Weekly #043 (MP3 - 14.2 MB - 20 min)
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In todays show: Writers move their strike a little closer to the end of the second act pivot… Penguins only Live Twice… And in my commentary, I look at the independent movie theatre – small, weak and vulnerable. All this and the hundred greatest [...]

Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid have been persuaded, after two years of begging, cajoling, and delicious lingonberry preserves, to allow the construction of an ABBA museum in Stockholm. Stockholm also is famous for the hostage/kidnapper syndrome which bears its name. Coincidence? Yes.
Reports the BBC, the couple behind the project, Ulf Westmand and Ewia Wigenheim-Westman came [...]

Sooner or later you were going to find this out about me; I don’t like Christmas. I want no part of it. So it warms the stone-cold cockles of my heart to read a longish piece in the Los Angeles Times this morning about the sad and hilarious decline of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, a [...]

I’m a sucker for a well-written pan, and technology maven Andy Ihnatko has a beaut of one in his column for the Chicago Sun-Times. In it Ihnatko heaps his elegantly crafted scorn on the recently released Microsoft Zune player, the iPod for people who wish they had less control over their own content.
“The Zune is [...]

I read today an interesting little Reuter’s backgrounder about KNBC Channel 4.4 in Los Angeles. First some background on the backgrounder: when the FCC first started talking about allotting frequency spectrum to stations, there was some controversy about how they had to use it. The FCC favors high-definition programming which takes up a lot of [...]

Larry Blamire is a filmmaker who mines a particularly rare vein. His most famous effort, THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA, is a pitch-perfect parody of those second-bill drive in features of the fifties, with their tin-eared dialog and markedly un-special effects. I’m proud to say that the only framed movie poster I own is of [...]

DIRECTOR ROBERT ALTMAN, 81, DIES
Over 30 people will deliver eulogies… all at the same time.
MICHAEL RICHARDS HIRES PR EXPERT
Perhaps if he’d done this earlier, he’d have never had to go into standup in the first place.
DAVID BLAINE ESCAPES FROM SUSPENDED GYROSCOPE, TAKES CHILDREN ON SHOPPING SPREE
How nice… but he’s still creepy.
OJ SIMPSON SAYS THE [...]

This story seems just a little suspicious to me…
A remake of the 1984 cult classic “Revenge of the Nerds” has been shut down after only two weeks because it was too raunchy for the Atlanta university hosting the production.
After the $12.5 million film — from fledgling director Kyle Newman — was kicked off the campus [...]